Despite the filing of a change request by the Applicant to attempt to conform to Category 2 Safeguard Advice, the TLD .HOTELS remains an exclusive registry and thus fails to alleviate the public policy concerns raised by the GAC. The change request should thus be denied.

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The ICANN Board Resolution (2015.06.21.NG02), following GAC advice, prohibited closed generics in this current round of TLD applications and advised applicants such as Booking.com to submit a change request to no longer be an exclusive generic TLD or to withdraw their application; otherwise the application will be deferred to the next round”.

Against that background Booking.com filed a change request on 12 January 2016, with only very minimal amendments. As illustrated below in a non-exhaustive manner, the amended version of the application is clearly confirming that Booking.com will fully control and restrict at its sole discretion, registration and use of domain names under .HOTELS.

The application for .HOTELS was drafted as an exclusive access TLD, also known as closed TLD, namely a TLD within which the registration and use of domain names are not opened to third parties and controlled by the Registry Operator at its discretion.

An opening of the TLD .HOTELS would have necessitated important changes to the application to demonstrate that .HOTELS would not be operated in an exclusive fashion which is not the case here.

Instead of this the Applicant has merely introduced a reference to a concept named "Eligible Trusted Third Parties". However the Applicant has not provided any information on how these "Eligible Trusted Third Parties" will be identified or how they will become eligible, there is no definition whatsoever. The substance of the application has not changed, because otherwise necessitated important changes would have been introduced. Furthermore, the application is now more restrictive rather than less restrictive, as in some instances, vague statements referring to third parties have been replaced with the concept of Eligible Trusted Third Parties.